SHORTCUTS CORNER

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Member Requests

• Federico

We can approach this problem in two ways, Scott:

1. Filter videos by resolution;
2. Thanks to Workflow 1.5, filter by frame rate as well.

Filtering by video resolution is pretty straightforward: you can choose the resolution to filter videos with using a menu at the top; the value you pick is saved with its width parameter to a variable. If you want to add more resolutions to the mix, remember to save the Width variable for each option like I did for 720p and 1080p.

Then, we can use the Filter Images action – which also supports videos – to filter items where the media type is “Video” and the width is the value picked from the menu. Make sure that the Filter action uses “All of the following are true” to match conditions, otherwise all kinds of videos from your library will be returned. At the end, all found videos (I set the workflow to look for the last 10 videos) will be saved into an album of your choice.

The other way, which is based on a new option in Workflow 1.5, is to filter videos by frame rate. Using the same structure of the example above, we can build a workflow that asks for frame rates and then saves a variable with, say, the values for 30 and 60 FPS videos.

However, because frame rates can be variable, I’d recommend filtering for values around the frame rate of your choice. For instance, if you’re looking for a 30 FPS video, I’d suggest looking for videos with a frame rate between 25 and 35 to compensate for the variability of frame rates. My workflow does it by calculating a difference of 5 for the FPS variable.

Then, in the Filter action, we can check for frame rate greater than the lowest value but smaller than the highest one, making sure that we’re filtering for a video media type and that “All” criteria are matched. You can choose how many of the latest videos from your library you want to fetch, and you can then save everything to an album of your choice at the end. (The Album itself could be a variable picked from a menu if you want.)

I’m leaving it up to you to play around with the workflows and experiment. You could combine checking for resolution and frame rates in the same workflow (say, if you want to check for 1080p videos at 60 FPS shot on an iPhone 6s) or you could add other menus or make this work from the action extension. I think this template is a nice demonstration of the new video filtering capabilities in Workflow 1.5.

You can download the workflows here and here.

• Federico

Unfortunately, iOS apps can’t export cookies stored in Safari, which means that Workflow can’t access whatever happens in its in-app web view based on Safari View Controller (new in version 1.5.). Apple built iOS with clear sandboxing restrictions, and this is one of those cases where apps cannot request access to that functionality. I don’t personally know of any third-party browser with that sort of feature, but if you’re trying to automate a captcha, I think it could be done using Python. I’ll leave it up to Club members to send us ideas about this.

• Federico

We can’t move a sheet from Ulysses on iOS to Evernote – we can copy it to Evernote, and it’s pretty easy to do so with Workflow. With one caveat: Workflow currently doesn’t support Ulysses’ TextBundle file format to combine plain text and images in a single file. For now, I’d recommend exporting from Ulysses as Markdown and using the Workflow action extension to save your text to a new note in Evernote for archival.

In Ulysses, hit the share icon in the top right corner, select Text > Markdown from the title bar menu, and hit the share button again. Choose ‘Send to’, pick the Workflow action extension, and then run this workflow. Your Markdown text will be converted to rich text for Evernote and you’ll be asked to pick a title for the new note and a destination notebook.

• Federico

I’m going to assume that it’s okay if we use Drafts for this, Ryan. We can achieve what you want, and we can even do it without leaving Drafts, but the caveat is that we can’t use the iOS ‘Share’ button of the copy & paste menu. We have to launch a workflow with a Drafts action.

To do this, we have to tell Workflow which text we want to modify, its position in a draft (so we can share entire drafts or a selection inside a draft), and we need to provide a draft’s unique ID so Workflow can go back to it and replace selected text with a modified version. All of this is possible thanks to Drafts’ template tags and script actions.

First, I installed Phillip Gruneich’s replace range script action to normalize how selection ranges are generated. If some text is selected in Drafts, the action outputs its start and length values; if no text is selected, values for the entire draft are returned.

Then, from a second Drafts action we can include a step for Phillip’s one (which is required, so make sure to install it first) and build a template to share the draft’s metadata and selected text with Workflow. We’ll use a process similar to what I do for Club MacStories requests: using plain text tags, we’ll specify metadata before the actual text and use regex match groups (new in Workflow 1.5) to isolate them.

At this point, the second action will open the iOS share sheet, where you can run the Workflow extension and select our workflow. In a second, the draft will be update with the selected text transformed – like magic.

Behind the scenes, Workflow separates values for selection ranges and UUID from the selected text, and it applies a Change Case conversion to the text. You can change this to whatever you want as long as the text is saved to a Replace variable at the end.

Last, Workflow uses the replaceRange option of the Drafts URL scheme to re-open the draft and replace the selected text with the new version. And because it runs from the action extension, the transition is seamless and the selection in the draft stays active.

I’m pretty proud of this workflow – it works quite beautifully and it’s fast. To make it work, you can download Phillip’s Drafts action, my action, and the workflow here.

• Federico

The trick here, Steve, is to set a base file name initially (e.g. “Border Collie”) and then create a Count variable that starts at 0. Every time the workflow runs for each selected picture, the variable counts up by 1 so you end up with photos renamed as “Border Collie - 1”, “Border Collie - 2”, etc. If you’d like to format the name differently, just change the position of the fileName and Count variables in the Text action inside the Repeat block.

If you don’t want to save pictures to iCloud Drive, you can swap the ‘Save File’ action for something else.

You can download the workflow here.

• John

I suggest using Hazel for this, Mike. The great thing about Hazel is that it is folder based. To create a text file at regular intervals that is saved to Dropbox all you need to do is set up Hazel to monitor your Applications folder and then pick a frequency to run the script you see in the screenshot. That script creates a list of apps in that folder and then saves them to a plain text file. You’ll have to modify the script to reflect your own directory path to your Dropbox folder.

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And now, some member feedback for a workflow request from Issue 33 on presentations with multiple outputs.

Suggestion: That cannot be solved by Workflow, but a solution is available in Microsoft Office – linking documents with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

Apple once had similar technology called OpenDoc, but Steve Jobs killed it when he returned to Apple in 1997. Currently, iWork doesn’t support Microsoft Office’s OLE, so an Apple software solution does not exist.

Microsoft Office’s OLE support across platforms outside Windows is not clear, but at least the Mac version should work. It seems like Google Docs is not supporting OLE either, but embedded Google Docs inside webpages for slideshows should also work. (Denken, @denkeni)

Suggestion: To me it sounds like Mark wants to have three presentation-related outputs updated automatically from one input. I think what would actually suit the underlying requirement is one source that can generate three different outputs on demand – i.e. maintain all content in one place and outputs are generated each time (replacing previous outputs) filtering out only the content required for that output.

Assuming this is an appropriate way to tackle the issue, I would use a combination of presenter notes and alternating in hidden slides into the slide deck – a set of standalone slides, a set of slides with presenter notes, and a set of slides with student notes. In addition, when run the slide deck would display only the presentation slides and it would have the presenter notes up on the presenter’s private display.

This approach is certainly achievable with both Keynote and PowerPoint on the Mac and I’ve written up my approach along with providing a sample presentation and outputs for each app. This can be found here.

The approach could also be sped up (as noted in the blog post) by the use of an AppleScript or a Keyboard Maestro macro to automate the generation of the outputs. (Stephen)

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